Evaluation of RMES, an Automated Software Tool Utilizing AI, for Literature Screening with Reference to Published Systematic Reviews as Case-Studies: Development and Usability Study

Abstract

Background: Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are important to evidence-based medicine, but the information retrieval and literature screening procedures are burdensome tasks. Rapid Medical Evidence Synthesis (RMES; Deloitte Tohmatsu Risk Advisory LLC) is a software designed to support information retrieval, literature screening, and data extraction for evidence-based medicine.

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the accuracy of RMES for literature screening with reference to published systematic reviews.

Methods: We used RMES to automatically screen the titles and abstracts of PubMed-indexed articles included in 12 systematic reviews across 6 medical fields, by applying 4 filters: (1) study type; (2) study type + disease; (3) study type + intervention; and (4) study type + disease + intervention. We determined the numbers of articles correctly included by each filter relative to those included by the authors of each systematic review. Only PubMed-indexed articles were assessed.

Results: Across the 12 reviews, the number of articles analyzed by RMES ranged from 46 to 5612. The number of PubMed-cited articles included in the reviews ranged from 4 to 47. The median (range) percentage of articles correctly labeled by RMES using filters 1-4 were: 80.9% (57.1%-100%), 65.2% (34.1%-81.8%), 70.5% (0%-100%), and 58.6% (0%-81.8%), respectively.

Conclusions: This study demonstrated good performance and accuracy of RMES for the initial screening of the titles and abstracts of articles for use in systematic reviews. RMES has the potential to reduce the workload involved in the initial screening of published studies.

Keywords: RMES; Rapid Medical Evidence Synthesis; artificial intelligence; automated literature screening; natural language processing; randomized controlled trials; systematic reviews; text mining.